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    US lawmakers unite to condemn Charlie Kirk shooting: ‘Reject political violence’

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    The shooting of the rightwing activist Charlie Kirk at a Utah college prompted outrage among both Democrats and Republicans, with Donald Trump and top officials condemning what appeared to be the latest act of political violence in the United States.“We must all pray for Charlie Kirk, who has been shot. A great guy from top to bottom. GOD BLESS HIM!” said Trump on Truth Social. The president survived an assassination attempt while campaigning for re-election in July 2024, and was targeted by a second assassin weeks later.“Say a prayer for Charlie Kirk, a genuinely good guy and a young father,” tweeted the vice-president, JD Vance. He later posted a photo of him alongside Kirk, writing: “Dear God, protect Charlie in his darkest hour.”Kash Patel, the FBI director, said the bureau “stands in full support of the ongoing response and investigation” into the shooting, which occurred during Kirk’s appearance at Utah Valley University in Orem, south of Salt Lake City. “Our thoughts are with Charlie, his loved ones, and everyone affected,” Patel said.Kirk’s condition after the shooting was described as critical.Congress’s top Republicans and Democrats joined in the condemnation, with several ascribing political motives to the attack. “There is no place in our country for political violence. Period, full stop,” said John Thune, the Republican Senate majority leader. Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic House minority leader, echoed the sentiment, saying: “Political violence is NEVER acceptable.”“Please join us in praying for our good friend, Charlie Kirk,” said Mike Johnson, the Republican speaker of the House.The House oversight committee took a break from considering more than a dozen bills to change laws in Washington DC as part of Trump’s militarized crackdown on crime in the district to hold a moment of silence in Kirk’s honor, after Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican congressperson, informed the panel about the attack.Democrats seen as potential presidential contenders in 2028 also denounced the violence.“The attack on Charlie Kirk is disgusting, vile, and reprehensible. In the United States of America, we must reject political violence in EVERY form,” said Gavin Newsom, the California governor.Wes Moore, the Maryland governor, wrote on X: “Political violence is never acceptable. Ever. The First Lady and I are praying for him and his family at this time.” More

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      Marjorie Taylor Greene joins Bernie Sanders in urging US to end Gaza famine

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      Amid mostly silence in Congress, some US lawmakers on opposite sides of the political spectrum spoke out Saturday over a UN-backed report warning of famine in parts of Gaza.“Let’s be clear: President Trump has the power to end the starvation of the Palestinian people,” Vermont’s politically independent senator Bernie Sanders posted on X. “Instead he is doing nothing while watching this famine unfold. Enough is enough. No more American taxpayer dollars to Nethanyahu’s [sic] war machine.”Sanders, who also pushed resolutions to ban selling US weapons to Israel, has long been consistent about his concern regarding the humanitarian crisis in Gaza amid the war.Marjorie Taylor Greene, the outspoken, far-right Georgia Republican, also called for greater compassion for Palestinians in a social media post Saturday, a day after UN secretary general António Gutteres described the famine in the territory as a “failure of humanity”.The US representative, in a departure from the majority of her peers in Congress, described the Gaza humanitarian crisis as a genocide last month. In a long post on X, she then said that while Israel’s war against Hamas was justified, the suffering of civilians was not.“Does Hamas deserve it? Yes,” Greene wrote, in part. “Do innocent people and children deserve it? No.”“The innocent people in Gaza did not kill and kidnap the innocent people in Israel on Oct 7th,” she continued. “Just as we spoke out and had compassion for the victims and families of Oct7, how can Americans not speak out and have compassion for the masses of innocent people and children in Gaza?”Greene linked the entirety of US financial and military aid to Israel to the conflict, arguing that it “means every U.S. tax payer is contributing to Israel’s military actions”.“I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to pay for genocide in a foreign country against a foreign people for a foreign war that I had nothing to do with,” Greene concluded. “And I will not be silent about it.”The post received an almost immediate response from far-right influencer Laura Loomer, who reportedly petitioned the White House to suspend the entry of injured Palestinian children from Gaza to the US.Greene and Loomer, both claiming the mantle of Maga authenticity, have bitterly clashed on the issue, with Loomer falsely describing Palestinian children as a “national security threat” and “Islamic invaders”.Loomer, who is Jewish, once claimed that her ban from social media platforms for anti-Muslim hate speech was antisemitic, while Greene infamously shared an antisemitic conspiracy theory that wildfires in California might have been started by Jewish space lasers.On Saturday, Loomer hit out at Greene, falsely accusing her of calling for Palestinians from Gaza to be resettled in the US and asking: “Why are you advocating for GAZANS to come to the US? How is Islamic immigration ‘America First’?”The UN-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) said last week that parts of Gaza are experiencing a “man-made” famine in the Gaza governorate, which includes Gaza City, site of a new Israeli offensive.“As this Famine is entirely man-made, it can be halted and reversed,” the report said. “The time for debate and hesitation has passed, starvation is present and is rapidly spreading. There should be no doubt in anyone’s mind that an immediate, at-scale response is needed.”The Israeli agency heading aid distribution in Gaza, the Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), rejected the report, saying it “relies on partial, biased data and superficial information originating from Hamas”.On Saturday, Mike Huckabee, the US ambassador to Israel, said on X that “the [international] media is missing the real story of ‘famine’ in Gaza. Hostages ARE starving, Hamas is getting fat, & the UN declares famine while 92% of THEIR food is stolen to be sold by Hamas. Meanwhile UN food sits rotting in sun. The UN should declare itself corrupt & incompetent.”In her post, Greene wrote that if the US were being bombed day and night, with millions killed or injured, and the world said “Americans voted for their government so they deserve it… How would you feel? What would you think? What would you do?” More

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      What is going on with Marjorie Taylor Greene? | Arwa Mahdawi

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      Here’s a sentence I never thought I’d write: Marjorie Taylor Greene, a far-right conspiracy theorist and bigot who also happens to be a Republican congresswoman, has suddenly started to speak (a small amount of) sense. It’s unclear what exactly precipitated it, but the Georgia congresswoman has declared war on her fellow Republicans.“The course that [the Republican party] is on, I don’t want to have anything to do with it,” Greene told the Daily Mail last week.Greene went on to complain that her male colleagues treat their female peers badly, referencing the Trump administration pulling Elise Stefanik’s nomination for United Nations ambassador in favor of Mike Waltz. To refresh your memory, just a couple of months before getting confirmed as US ambassador to the UN, Waltz was ousted as national security adviser after it was revealed he had mistakenly added a journalist to a private Signal chat used to discuss strikes in Yemen. Weird how some people – and by “people” I mean well-connected white men – have a way of always failing up.“[Stefanik] got screwed by the White House,” Greene told the Mail. “I think there’s other women in our party that are really sick and tired of the way men treat Republican women.” Which is interesting wording: Greene doesn’t seem to care about how Republican men treat women in general, just the ones in the party. Still, baby steps and all that. It’s certainly amusing to see Greene suddenly have a revelation that a party led by a legally defined sexual predator may have some disturbing views about women.Greene seems to be having a lot of revelations lately: she recently became the first Republican lawmaker to say that there is a genocide happening in Gaza. She also criticized the Florida representative Randy Fine for dismissing a report about Israel’s forced starvation in Gaza as propaganda and writing “starve away” on social media.Fine, by the way, has previously said Gaza should be nuked and posted that Palestinians are “demons that live on Earth … they only deserve death.” There’s always very little outrage from lawmakers, or media coverage, about his hateful remarks because anti-Palestinian racism is a bipartisan position in the US.To be clear, I don’t think Greene’s comments about Gaza have anything to do with empathy for Palestinians. Unfortunately, I also don’t think her comments were prompted by an analysis of the growing consensus from respected experts that a genocide is under way. Rather, it’s more likely that Greene, a Christian nationalist who has a history of promoting Islamophobic and antisemitic conspiracy theories, is motivated by antisemitic impulses here. Let me be unequivocal about this: while she may occasionally be making more sense recently, Greene is no friend to the Palestinian cause specifically or progressive issues more generally.Nevertheless, it’s still fun to watch the congresswoman sow discord in the Republican party by calling for a release of the Epstein files, criticizing US strikes in Iran and denouncing Fox News. On Wednesday, for example, she took aim at the Fox News personality Mark Levin, who called the congresswoman a “lunatic”, by calling Fox News irrelevant.“[M]ost of the people that watch Fox News are very much up in age, the baby boomer generation, who I love … but that’s their biggest audience. That’s not the future of America,” the congresswoman said. That statement echoes comments she made to the former Florida Republican lawmaker Matt Gaetz in June, when she called Fox News and the New York Post “propaganda” and “neocon network news”.In that same conversation she said: “We have propaganda news on our side, just like the left does, and the American people have been brainwashed into believing that America has to engage in these foreign wars in order for us to survive, and it’s absolutely not true.”Keep going, Marjorie! While I can’t stress enough that MTG is no ally, that doesn’t mean she’s not an accidental asset when it comes to destroying the Republican party. I’ve lost any hope that the Democrats, a party that largely consists of self-interested careerists who don’t believe in much other than their own advancement and are happy to help fund a genocide, will mount any sort of meaningful fight against the worst instincts of Trumpism. When Maga eventually collapses it will be from infighting, not Democratic opposition.Trump names registered sex offender to lead children’s sports initiativeLawrence Taylor, a former New York Giants linebacker and registered sex offender has been appointed to a council that will advise on matters including youth sports. I can’t wait to hear from all the anti-trans “feminist” writers who declared Trump a “feminist hero” and “feminist icon” after he used an executive order to “protect” women by ensuring trans women couldn’t compete in women’s sports.Why are people throwing sex toys at US women’s basketball games?“The dildo is a weaponized farce,” writes Lee Escobedo in the Guardian. “It’s thrown not just to interrupt but to dominate the narrative, to remind players that their gender, their careers and their stage remain vulnerable to mockery.”Sexism and misogyny drive record levels of abuse at English football gamesIt’s not just basketball that has a major misogyny problem.I regret to inform you that there is ‘breast milk ice cream’ nowAnd of course it’s going viral.Women shouldn’t hold office, says Republican woman running for officeArizona state senate hopeful Mylie Biggs, the daughter of Republican representative Andy Biggs, told a podcast last year that she wouldn’t “vote for any female [and] I don’t know if females should be in office”.Musk’s Grok generates fake Taylor Swift nudes when you put it on ‘spicy’ modeMusk once offered to impregnate Swift. Not exactly surprising that his company’s chatbot, which has also praised Hitler in the past, would digitally undress her.Gates Foundation pledges $2.5bn to women’s health initiativesAccording to Bill Gates, his foundation is now the primary funder when it comes to researching the vaginal microbiome. It would be nice if we didn’t have to depend on the largesse of billionaires for women’s health funding.Report reveals abuse of pregnant women and children at US Ice facilitiesYet more evidence that the “pro-life” crowd, who have little to say about this, are not “pro-life” they are simply pro forced birth.What is the real death toll in Gaza?In a column this week, I argued the 60,000 figure is a major undercount. Responding to my column, Rachel Taylor, executive director of Every Casualty Counts, an international NGO that works to document casualties of armed violence, pointed out the following: “The Gaza population register is managed by the Israeli ministry of interior – they certify all births and deaths in Gaza. The Israeli authorities could immediately dispel all doubts about the number of deaths in Gaza by releasing the registered fatality figures from the past two years. But they choose not to. Why?”Sandra Domínguez fought against femicide in Mexico, then became a victim herselfDomínguez and her husband were found dead earlier this year and, while it’s not clear who killed them, her family believe her murder was tied to her feminist activism in Oaxaca.“Oaxaca is the most dangerous state in Mexico for activists,” the Guardian writes in a piece about Domínguez. “Since 2018, 58 people have been murdered and six more are missing.”Meta illegally collected data from period and pregnancy app, jury findsI know, I know: hard to believe that Meta would be doing something dodgy with people’s sensitive data. A real shocker.The week in pawtriarchyIt’s been another unbearable news week, so please enjoy this paw-late cleanser of a tiny Pomeranian called Scout chasing a large bear out of its house. Scout may only be six pounds but it’s clear who is top dog. More

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      Marjorie Taylor Greene says Republican party has lost touch with its base

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      Marjorie Taylor Greene, historically one of the most prominent voices in Donald Trump’s Maga movement, has declared in an interview that she feels that the Republican party has lost touch with its base, but she said she has no plans to leave the party.After telling the Daily Mail this week she was questioning whether she still belongs in the Republican fold, the Georgia congresswoman told the Guardian she would not become independent or seek a third party option.“No – I’m urging my own party to support ‘America first’,” Greene said.Still, she made clear resounding frustration with GOP leadership and her place within the party’s planning.“I don’t know if the Republican party is leaving me, or if I’m kind of not relating to Republican party as much any more,” Greene said in the Daily Mail interview. “I don’t know which one it is.”Greene, who boasts 7.5 million followers on X and commands one of the largest social media audiences of any Republican woman, accused party leaders of betraying core conservative principles.She did not criticize Trump himself, instead preferring to express her ire for what she attempted to paint as political elites.“I think the Republican party has turned its back on America First and the workers and just regular Americans,” she said, warning that GOP leadership was reverting to its “neocon” past under the influence of what she termed the “good ole boys” network.The 51-year-old lawmaker, in the roughly six-month mark following Trump’s return to the White House, said she was particularly frustrated with the House speaker, Mike Johnson, saying: “I’m not afraid of Mike Johnson at all.”Her remarks reflect a broader pattern of voter dissatisfaction with traditional party structures. Americans appear to also be holding deeply unfavorable views of both major parties: a July Wall Street Journal poll found 63% view the Democratic party unfavorably, its worst rating in 35 years, while Republicans fare only marginally better in most surveys.Independent or independent-leaning Americans now account for nearly half the electorate, according to July Gallup polling, and public support has increasingly shifted toward Democrats through those leaners in recent months.On Monday, Greene used social media to criticize the lack of accountability over what she deems key issues to the base, sharing a table showing no arrests for the “Russian Collusion Hoax”, “Jan 6th”, and “2020 Election”.“Like what happened all those issues? You know that I don’t know what the hell happened with the Republican Party. I really don’t,” she said in the interview. “But I’ll tell you one thing, the course that it’s on, I don’t want to have anything to do with it, and I just don’t care any more.”Her recent bills have targeted unconventional Republican territory: preventing cloud-seeding, making English the official US language, and cutting capital gains taxes on homes. She is also the first Republican in Congress to label the crisis in Gaza a genocide, and has called for ending foreign aid and using the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) to cut down fraud and waste in the government.Greene acknowledged her isolation within the party, saying: “I’m going alone right now on the issues that I’m speaking about.” More

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      Trump’s military attack on Iran reveals split among Maga diehards

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      Saturday’s US strikes on Iran provoked conflicting reactions from isolationist Republicans who support Donald Trump’s Make America great again (Maga) movement, catching them – like many Democrats – between supporting efforts against nuclear proliferation and opposing American intervention in foreign conflicts.The far-right congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene – a loyalist to the president – reacted to the strikes by urging those in the US to pray that terrorists do not attack “our homeland” in retaliation.“Let us join together and pray for the safety of our US troops and Americans in the Middle East,” Greene wrote on X.But Greene had not been so supportive in a message posted 30 minutes before Trump announced news of the surprise strikes on Saturday evening.In that message, Greene wrote: “Every time America is on the verge of greatness, we get involved in another foreign war. There would not be bombs falling on the people of Israel if [its prime minister Benjamin] Netanyahu had not dropped bombs on the people of Iran first. Israel is a nuclear armed nation. This is not our fight. Peace is the answer.”The former Trump White House adviser Steve Bannon, who has been an opponent of US military intervention in Iran, hit out at the president for thanking Netanyahu in a national address shortly after the strikes.Speaking on his War Room web show, Bannon said, “It hasn’t been lost … that he thanked Bibi Netanyahu, who I would think right now – at least the War Room’s position is – [is] the last guy on Earth you should thank.”That came amid ongoing speculation that Trump’s decision to attack Iran’s nuclear sites on Saturday stemmed from information that Iran was close to developing a weapon – as supplied by Israeli, and not US, intelligence sources. The issue created an apparent split between Trump and the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard.The president recently criticized Gabbard and the US intelligence community, saying they were “wrong” in assessing that Iran had not taken the political step of ordering a bomb. Gabbard has denied that she and Trump were not on the same page.Nonetheless, Bannon continued his criticism of the strikes, saying: “I don’t think we’ve been dealing from the top of the deck.”The former White House adviser also criticized Trump for leaving open the possibility of further US strikes if Iran fails to capitulate to US demands. “I’m not quite sure [it was] the talk that a lot of Maga wanted to hear,” he said. “It sounded … very open-ended.”Days earlier, amid signs of a Maga rebellion against the administration’s increasingly hawkish stance on Iran, Bannon told an audience in Washington that bitterness over the invasion and occupation of Iraq was a driving force for Trump’s first presidential victory. “One of the core tenets is no forever wars,” Bannon said.Bannon, though, said “the Maga movement will back Trump” despite its opposition to military interventions.But there are now signs that the Maga “America first” isolationist position may be more amenable to limited airstrikes. The administration has stressed that Saturday’s raids only targeted Iran’s nuclear enrichment and not manufacturing locations, population centers or economic assets, including the oil terminal at Karg island.The far-right influencer Charlie Kirk had warned of a Maga divide over Iran, saying “Trump voters, especially young people, supported [him] because he was the first president in my lifetime to not start a new war.”Yet on Sunday, Kirk reposted a clip of an interview with JD Vance on Meet the Press in which the vice-president praised the B-2 pilots from Missouri who carried out the previous day’s bombing.“They dropped 30,000 pound bombs on a target the size of a washing machine, and then got back home safely without ever landing in the Middle East,” Vance said in the clip. “Whatever our politics, we should be proud of what these guys accomplished.”In that interview, Vance suggested Trump had “probably” decided by mid-May that the diplomatic process with Iran was “not going anywhere”. But Vance refused to be drawn on when precisely Trump approved the strike, saying it probably came “over time”. More

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      Marjorie Taylor Greene criticized for not reading Trump’s ‘big, beautiful’ bill

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      Republican firebrand Marjorie Taylor Greene has drawn widespread criticism from Democratic colleagues for admitting that not only did she not read Donald Trump’s tax and spending bill before voting for it, but she would have voted against it had she read thoroughly.Greene revealed she was unaware of a provision in Trump’s “one big beautiful bill” (OBBB) that would prevent states from regulating artificial intelligence systems for a decade. The Georgia representative said she would have voted against the entire bill if she had known about the AI language buried on pages 278-279.“Full transparency, I did not know about this section on pages 278-279 of the OBBB that strips states of the right to make laws or regulate AI for 10 years,” Greene wrote on X. “I am adamantly OPPOSED to this and it is a violation of state rights and I would have voted NO if I had known this was in there.”Democratic lawmakers, who all voted against the bill, responded with incredulity of Greene’s admission.“You have one job. To. Read. The. Fucking. Bill,” Representative Eric Swalwell wrote in response.Representative Ted Lieu said he had read the AI provision beforehand and “that’s one reason I voted no on the GOP’s big, ugly bill”, he posted on X. “PRO TIP: It’s helpful to read stuff before voting on it.”Representative Mark Pocan was more forward: “Read the f**king bill instead of clapping for it like a performing monkey. You should have done your job while it was written. You didn’t. You own that vote.”The AI provision was added just two nights before the bill’s markup. It would prohibit state and local governments from pursuing “any law or regulation regulating artificial intelligence models, artificial intelligence systems, or automated decision systems” for 10 years, unless the purpose is to facilitate deployment of such systems.The language applies broadly to facial recognition systems, generative AI and automated decision-making tools used in hiring, housing and public benefits. Several states have already passed laws creating safeguards around such systems, which could become unenforceable if the bill passes the Senate.It also raises questions about the curious case of Republicans not reading sprawling legislation about provisions in the bill.Representative Mike Flood of Nebraska was booed by voters at a heated town hall last week when he admitted that a provision restricting federal judges’ ability to enforce contempt orders was “unknown” to him when he voted for the same bill. “I am not going to hide the truth: This provision was unknown to me when I voted for that bill,” Flood told the audience, prompting shouts from constituents who responded: “You voted for all of it.”But Greene and Flood aren’t the only unexpected sources to now disapprove of aspects of Trump’s “big, beautiful bill”: the world’s richest man and Trump ally Elon Musk called the legislation a “disgusting abomination” on X Tuesday afternoon.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“This massive, outrageous, pork-filled Congressional spending bill is a disgusting abomination,” Musk wrote, adding that it would “massively increase the already gigantic budget deficit to $2.5 trillion”.Democrats have highlighted that the bill includes significant cuts to healthcare and social programs, with reductions to Medicaid affecting millions of Americans and cuts to food assistance programs.In response to Greene’s admission, representative Yvette Clarke wrote: “Reading is fundamental! Maybe if your colleagues weren’t so hellbent on jamming a bill down our throats in the dead of night, and bending the knee to Trump, you would’ve caught this, Sis!”Representative Delia Ramirez noted that Greene appeared to have missed other provisions affecting her constituents: “Oh, Marjorie! If you had read the bill, you would’ve also seen that 149,705 of your constituents could lose their Medicaid.”The House energy and commerce committee advanced the reconciliation package last Wednesday. Greene has called for the AI provision to be removed in the Senate, warning that “we have no idea what AI will be capable of in the next 10 years”. More

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      Sold-out farm shops, smuggled deliveries and safety warnings: US battle over raw milk grows

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      It’s 8am, and Redmond, an 11-year-old Brown Swiss dairy cow and designated matriarch of the Churchtown Dairy herd, has been milked in her designated stall. She is concentrating on munching hay; her seventh calf is hovering nearby.The herd’s production of milk, sold unpasteurised in half-gallon and quart glass bottles in an adjacent farm store, sells out each week. It has become so popular that the store has had to limit sales.Redmond and her resplendent bovine sisters, wintering in a Shaker-style barn in upstate New York, appear unaware of the cultural-political storm gathering around them – an issue that is focusing minds far from farmyard aromas of mud and straw.The production and state-restricted distribution of raw milk, considered by some to boost health and by ­others to be a major risk to it, has become a perplexing political touchstone on what is termed the “Woo-to-Q pipeline”, along which yoga, wellness and new age spirituality adherents can drift into QAnon conspiracy beliefs.Robert F Kennedy Jr, Donald Trump’s pick to run the US Department of Health, is an advocate. He has made unpasteurised milk part of his Make America Healthy Again movement and recently tweeted that government regulations on raw milk were part of a wider “war on public health”.View image in fullscreenRepublican congresswoman and conspiracy theorist Marjorie Taylor Greene has posted “Raw Milk does a body good”. But the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) says that “raw milk can carry dangerous germs such as salmonella, E coli, listeria, campylobacter and others that cause foodborne illness”.Last week, the US Department of Agriculture issued an order to broaden tests for H5N1 – bird flu – in milk at dairy processing ­facilities, over fears that the virus could become the next Covid-19 if it spreads through US dairy herds and jumps to humans. Since March, more than 700 dairy herds across the US have tested ­positive for bird flu, mostly in California. But the new testing strategy does not cover farms that directly process and sell their own raw milk.At the same time, another dairy product has become the subject of conspiracy theories after misinformation spread about the use of Bovaer in cow feed in the UK. Arla Foods, the Danish-Swedish company behind Lurpak, announced trials of the additive, designed to cut cow methane emissions, at 30 of its farms. Some social media users raised concerns over the additive’s safety and threatened a boycott, despite Bovaer being approved by regulators.In the US, raw milk is seen as anti-government by the right, anti-corporate by the left, and amid the fracturing political delineations, lies a middle ground unmoved by either ideology.“Food production has always been political,” says Churchtown Dairy owner and land reclamation pioneer, Abby Rockefeller.Churchtown manager Eric Vinson laments raw milk has been lumped in with QAnon and wellness communities. “There’s an idea around that ­people who want to take ownership of their health have started to become conspiratorial,” he says. “It’s unfortunate. Raw milk may be a political issue but it’s not a right-left issue.”Iowa, Montana, North Dakota, Alaska, Georgia, and Wyoming have passed laws or changed rules to allow the sale at farms or shops since 2020. In New York, sales are legal at farms with permits, although supplies are smuggled into the city marked “for cats and dogs”. There is no suggestion Churchtown is involved in that.Amish communities abandoned a non-political stance in the national elections in November and voted Republican, in part over the raw milk issue. An Amish organic farm was raided by the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture in January.There are also the health-aware “farmers’ market mums”, who say they are looking to raw milk for an immunity boost, and who harbour latent anger over the government pandemic response and vaccine mandates.View image in fullscreenRachel, a Manhattan mother of a three-year-old, who declined to be fully identified, citing potential social judgment, said: “After Covid, more of us started thinking about our bodies and health because of scepticism around doctors, hospitals and a corrupted health care system.” But like many people, she said, she felt she’d been “caught in the middle” of a political battle.Sales of raw milk are up between 21% and 65% compared with a year ago, according to the market research firm NielsenIQ. Mark McAfee, California raw milk advocate and owner of Raw Farm USA in Fresno, says production and supply across the state is growing at 50% a year. But the FDA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention call raw milk one of the “riskiest” foods people can consume. Experts say they are “horrified” by a trend they consider a roll-back of Louis Pasteur’s 19th-century invention of pasteurisation.Vinson disagrees with the idea that raw milk is “inherently dangerous” and argues, because conventional dairies rely on pasteurisation, “they don’t have to worry about sanitation around the milking practices – they can cut corners”. “You have to be more careful producing raw milk but it brings a higher price,” he adds.View image in fullscreenSince the pandemic, visitors to Churchtown have increased.Earlier this month, McAfee’s Raw Farm was hit by a notice from the California Department of Health warning that H5 virus, better known as bird flu, had been detected in a batch of cream-top whole raw milk.It’s not yet known if the virus can be transmitted to people who consume infected milk but the CDC officials warn that people who drink raw milk could theoretically become infected.Back at Churchtown Dairy, Vinson is tending the herd. A huge Jersey cow shadows her four-day old calf. At weekends, he offers tours of the barn to raw milk-curious visitors. “One of my main jobs is informing the public about farming and agricultural issues,” he says. That includes being receptive to changes. “It is important to say we don’t know everything and keep an eye open.” More

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      Marjorie Taylor Greene issues warning to Republicans opposing Matt Gaetz nomination

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      Marjorie Taylor Greene, the firebrand Republican congresswoman from Georgia, has intervened on behalf of Matt Gaetz, Donald Trump’s embattled attorney general nominee, by issuing a bizarre challenge to her Republican colleagues.Amid intensifying pressure for the release of a congressional report into alleged sexual misconduct that could sink Gaetz’s nomination, Taylor Greene demanded similar full disclosure of what she claimed were multiple reports of assault and sexual harassment filed against fellow Republican Congress members.She also said she had filed one of the claims herself.“For my Republican colleagues in the House and Senate, If we are going to release ethics reports and rip apart our own that Trump has appointed, then put it ALL out there for the American people to see,” Taylor Greene wrote on X in a post which had received 1.3m views by Tuesday 1pm ET.“Yes.. all the ethics reports and claims including the one I filed, all your sexual harassment and assault claims that were secretly settled paying off victims with tax payer money, the entire Jeffrey Epstein files, tapes, recordings, witness interviews but not just those, there’s more, Epstein wasn’t/isn’t the only asset. If we’re going to dance, let’s all dance in the sunlight,” she wrote.She concluded with what appeared to be a veiled threat: “I’ll make sure we do.”While not elucidating on the seemingly scattershot allegations, Taylor Greene’s intervention exposed the fissures opened up in Republican ranks by Trump’s nomination of Gaetz as America’s top law official.Republican senators have voiced their opposition in sufficient numbers to torpedo his nomination if they vote with their sentiments in Senate confirmation hearings scheduled to take place once Trump returns to the White House.Gaetz forestalled last Friday’s scheduled publication of a report compiled by the House of Representatives ethics committee into his alleged misdemeanors by resigning his seat after Trump nominated him.Nevertheless, fellow Republican members of Congress and senators are demanding its release for consideration in the confirmation process, triggering Taylor Greene’s outburst.The document is believed to be highly damaging to Gaetz, amid allegations that he paid two women, including a 17-year-old minor, for sex in 2017. It also said that he took drugs, including ecstasy. The allegations formed part of a two-year criminal investigation – subsequently dropped without charges – by the FBI into Gaetz’s possible involvement in suspected sex trafficking.Lawyers for women who have testified to witnessing Gaetz’s behavior have fed more details of the affair to US media in recent days, increasing the pressure on the nominee and triggering speculation that they could be called as witnesses to hearings which now seem likely to turn into a media circus.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe depth of feeling against Gaetz among his fellow Republican Congress members has been demonstrated in interviews some have given on television.Max Miller, a Republican member for Ohio, told CNN that he reflected the private sentiments of many in saying Gaetz should not be attorney general.“I’m looking at him as a member of Congress and the job that he has done here, and it has been abhorrent,” he said. “I’m not the only one who thinks this way. I just say the quiet part out loud, and I wish other my colleagues would have the same courage to do so, but him as a member of Congress, should not be the most powerful law enforcement individual in our country, and everyone knows it, and he’s not going to get confirmed.”Tony Gonzales, a representative for Texas – who once called Gaetz and other far-right Congress members “scumbags” – said cryptically: “Matt’s kind of a quiet guy. We’re all still trying to get to know who he is, but soon enough, the American people get to know who he is.” More